Talking about asteroids hitting Earth...
>From Larry Niven's "N-Space" collection of short stories, an excerpt about the "Milford Writers' Conference".
Quote:
James Blish brought the first section of a novel, "A Torrent of Faces", and described what he had planned for the rest. An asteroid is due for collision with Earth... an Earth inhabited by a trillion people, with no margin of error for any such a catastrophe. Bombs are placed to blow away pieces of the rock; lasers fired from the Moon are to boil away some of the surface; but too much of it will touch down...
My turn. "Suppose you fire those lasers at just one side of the body? Boil one side. Vapor pressure, law of reaction. Couldn't you cause it to miss Earth?"
Blish said, "I hope not."
It took me a moment to join the laughter... to realize that I'd suggested a way to shoot down the plot for his novel!
---- This message was posted by rhinoceros to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25784>
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